Advanced 3D system architecture

This is a thing I normally don't do: Embedding someone else's stuff on my blog. However, this is an exception.

The video below shows how IBM uses Second Life in order to create 3D system models. This one was posted at the 8bar blog.

It's Infocalypse for Second Life

Infocalypse at the economic heart of Second Life?

It's a warzone! The Linden Index has crashed, it's economy is imploding and one after the other financial scandal is hitting the blogoshpere. Someone just shouted "The end is near!" over at twitter. Well, there is some truth in this part of the blog.

Due to Linden Labs taking actions against gambling in SL - incorporating RL law there has been a drop in money exchange. This will be a temporary setback as it will make way for new and healthy business. What is serious is that there has been theft at the WSE, the World Stock Exchange, an inside-job so it seems. Extensive coverage can be found at the Virtually Blind blog.

Infocalypse at the social heart of Second Life?

Then there is rumours of Terrorism in Second Life, coming from a paper Down Under. Fortunately this piece of bad-research has quickly been dysected by Mitch Wagner at Informationweek:

"The article cites well-known reports of "griefing" in Second Life -- malicious practical joking -- and employs a lot of breathless prose and distortion to make it seem like the global terror network is on the brink of using Second Life to launch a real-world terror campaign against all decent people everywhere."

There's no such thing as Second Life taking casualties. We're not talking about real life bombings. What we are talking about is griefing, which is WEB -10.0 [in other words neanderthal behaviour which is sooo 2007 (BC)]

What will be the fall-out of these stories? In my personal opinion it is way overdone. These blogposts over at Second Thoughts and Metaversed are providing the Griefers a sublime stage. They're feeding it! It seems Prokofy's fabled paranoia and FICification have entered the next stage of the conspiracy-theory-virus.

In my humble opinion, this is all strongly overhyped. This is confirmed by reliable sources who say that Linden "can shoot themselves in the foot just fine."

Infocalypse at the creative heart of Second Life!

Before we all go dramatic on Second Life, here's the twist: The only place where real infocalypse is going down is on the islands of Infocalypse, Saijo City and Nexus Prime, home to the cyberpunk community and spindoctor Eric Rice.

There's the Infocalypse project which is offering a podium and decorum for writing vivid new cyberpunk stories. Second Life proofs to be an excellent stage once more for collaboration and making stories come to life!

Here's an extract from the original blogpost mixed with some screenshots of these sims:

Say you wanted to create derivative work, say, a novel or video game or drawing, and place it in those locations, technically you can’t. You *can* if you consider fan fiction (’fanfic’ for short), but don’t ever expect to do anything with it beyond your own personal amusement. Build as little as a fan site, one that celebrates a franchise, and you could be beamed up to the USS Litigation. This has a long history and is certainly not new (flashback: Wired, Dec. 1996).

Enter Saijo City. Saijo exists as a newborn franchise that could be any one of those works of fiction. There are characters and there is the place of the city itself. Saijo’s genre is cyberpunk, set in a near future of maybe 60-100 years out.

What makes Saijo City different and not spectacularly ‘new’, is that it exists as many pieces, both traditional and contemporary, that are simply rearranged. It would be easy to say, “Yes, I’m writing a science fiction book, due out this summer,” and the conversation would be over.

But that’s not how life in my city goes.

Saijo City as a piece of transliterate content, operates on some very simple and familiar principles. (read more at I, Platform)

Capozzi branding hyperjump

Everything new gets dubbed 2.0 these days, upto and including the Financial Times writing on gospel 2.0 or the blogoshpere getting excited about Philantropy 2.0 or Fundraising 2.0. To state that this blogpost is about wine 2.0 or distilling 2.0 would not give credit enough to the sim I visited today...

This is a tale beyond a succesful immersion - even when the island hasn't seen it's final version and opening yet. This is a tale of creating a brand 21st century style in a 19th century business.

The business I'm referring to is that of making wine, a traditional profession that -at least in Europe- brings images of old, weathered farmers and old French chateau's. It's classic and romantic and absolutely non-tech-savvy. During the 20th century we have seen the rise of new wineproduction areas, like California, South Africa and New Zealand gaining popularity over the traditional French and Spanish wines. The popularity of these new wines are partly because these wineries use modern technology to create well balanced wines and of a more constant quality than the traditional French ones.

Here's a look at the Capozzi sim

To start off by calling this a hyperjump and getting all excited about it does raise some expectations. Why?

If you look at the sim -without its context- it's nothing special. It is a quality build, as expected when built by Chip Poutine of the Prion Design Group and the guys (and girls) over at Metaversatility. Lush green rolling hills house the winery and a path that leads through the various stages of the production process. Though totally different in design than the Ben & Jerry's factory in Second Life, it's the same concept. So why the buzz?

The buzz is that this is not a brand creating a virtual presence like "we've got to be there" but it is a grand design in creating the brand itself. The Capozzi winery was established in 2005 by Josh Hermsmeyer and really is a tale of crowdsourcing as it started off on the pinotblogger blog:

"On November 18, ‘05 pinotblogger was born. Its stated purpose is to “outline the long and painful processes involved in starting and building a family winery in the Russian River Valley. While we haven’t been at it very long nor has it been particularly painful yet, I’m 99.9% certain that at least one of these adjectives will correctly describe the project in the very near future (hopefully NOT painful and short though, as that would be sad)."

Meanwhile the Pinotblogger website has been been among the top 5 wineblogs in the world and gives a great insight in the business and starting up the new winery. The virtual presence complements this strategy. It's an all in, a 21st century marketing campaign from a traditional craft, that's a hyperjump.

Read more on the build of the sim at the http://www.simvineyard.com/ website, or visit it inworld: SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Capozzi%20Winery/121/235/37

Telecom Italia brings San Siro

I just picked up a notice on the Dutch Second Life site on Telecom Italia Mobile. Telecom Italia subsidiary, Alice, comes to Second Life with a 4 sim strong build making it about the 12th telecom and broadband provider to immerse.

The venue is brought to Second Life by ISN (Image Solutions Network) which have their office next to the TIM-sims. As we speak there's a lot of activity going on over there, so probably a launch party. Due to my limited knowledge of Italian i thought it best to steer clear of that gig.

The TIM-sims are build around a central venue, the Alice office which is crown-shaped and lies at the intersection of the four sims. Throughout the sims several other office buildings appear.

Telecom Italia is showing that there are several ways of translating its business to the Metaspace. Throughout the sims you will find futuristic phonebooths to communicatie with Real Life and from their Alice broadband division they are bringing Italy's most popular sports; Soccer and Formula 1 racing.

According to the SLNN Alice plans on not only streaming soccermatches from the San Siro stadium (AC Milan and Inter Milan) but also play virtual matches, with a special Heads Up Display (HUD) being developed:

"While some soccer stadiums, most notably KPN's Ajax Arena, and Inter of Milano have featured broadcasts of soccer games, Telecom Italia's sim promises the first full game soccer animation, using a script and a heads up display (HUD) so that users can actually play.

We will organize real tournaments, both for soccer and for car and moto racing,” Mattia Crespi, ISN's CEO said. Alice offers online service selling videos on demand. Videos will be available at the Alice island for free, along with many videos taken from Dailymotion, an Alice video-sharing service similar to Youtube, Crespi says."

For this video on demand venue Alice worked out a fly-in movietheatre (pic right)

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Telecom%20Italia%202/101/120/22

Nintendo - Xbox and Playstation sighted in SL

First of all a few random islands I've spotted today. One is a new telecom company in SL, Swisscom (Telecom provider from Switzerland) (SLURL). Aside from this sure thing there are two islands look to be holding new business as well, Generali (Banking)(SLURL) and Carpe Diem (Beds of Sweden) (SLURL) may also hold new businesses.

Secondly I ran into a cluster of islands that bring a promise of fierce competition, these islands are called:

1. Nintendo
2. Nintendo Wii
3. Microsoft Xbox
4. Sony
5. Sony Playstation
6. Sega

Finally, Sony has been present with its music division, Sony BMG at the Millions of Us cluster island 'Media' but looks like they're gearing up as well in the Japanese quarters with a sim called Sony Home Pictures (SLURL).

Second Life Yummy Garden

Just once in a while you meet that occasional mouthwatering venue in Second Life. In response to my Brand Directory listing Gwen Kronsage tipped this venue in Second Life. While walking around in this virtual garden of delights I noticed quite a steady stream of visitors from every corner of the world.

This yummy garden is brought to us by Ben & Jerry's, the masters of icecream. Although BJ's must have got almost the same all-american image as the big M it's actually owned by Unilever, a Dutch multinational with over 400 well known brands.

The main venue holds a very colorfull factory, Ben & Jerry's First Environmental Factory with several dairy pastures and games. Upon entering the factory you'll get a floor plan and an overview of B&J's history.

The factory is a fun experience as you walk through the complete production process:

1. Mix Making
2. Flavouring
3. Greenhouse
4. Packaging
5. Freezing

As an extra service there's the Ben & Jerrys orientation island, which is also in this übersweet candy-color style. A nice detail would have been to create a cream-topped hairdo, but maybe that would be too much for Second Life rookies.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ben%20and%20Jerrys/128/128/0

Get yer free stack of virtual land

I just received word via twitter that Millions of Us is giving away free land to residents with creative ideas, a grand total of 8 complete sims:

"Social media is all about participation, right? In that spirit, Millions of Us will be opening up land on several of its sims in order to host the coolest projects you can come up with. We own 8 perimeter sims, clustered around the central eponymous sim — and that’s where we invite interested and motivated residents to help us fill those sims with fantastic Second Life content."

Read all at the Millions of Us blog.

VeeJay's Branddirectory

Here's a list of Real Life brands in Second Life. I think the list is nearing completion, but I surely have forgotten a few. Which ones?

For a better view have a look at the page I'm setting up here. In that overview I've added flags to show where these companies are based, or which local office took the initiative (e.g. Fiat is Italian, but brought to Second Life from Brasil and Renault from France, but brought to Second Life by the Italians).

Advertising

1. AKQA


2. Abramelin Studios


3. Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty


4. Crayon


5. Dieste Marketing


6. Heartbeat Digital


7. Leo Burnett


8. Mediacom


9. Square One Research


10. Text 100

Automotive

11. BMW


12. Fiat


13. Mazda


14. Mercedes


15. Motorati / Pontiac


16. Nissan


17. Renault


18. Toyota

Employment Services

19. Content


20. Kelly


21. Manpower


22. Randstad

Finance

23. ABN Amro


24. BCV


25. BNP Paribas


26. Cofidis


27. Credit Agricole


28. Deutsche AG


29. DNB Norway


30. ING


31. Saxo


32. Suruga


33. Visa


34. Wirecard

Food & Beverage

35. Capozzi Winery


36. Coca Cola


37. Guinness


38. Heineken


39. Suntory

Insurance

40. Aegon


41. Unive

Information Technology

42. Amazon Web Services


43. AMD


44. Autodesk


45. Cisco


46. Dell


47. Depo Consulting


48. IBM


49. Intel


50. Lenovo


51. Level 3


52. Microsoft


53. PA Consulting


54. Softlab


55. Sogeti


56. Sprint


57. Sun

Media & Entertainment

58. ABC


59. Avro


60. BBC Radio 1


61. BNN


62. Channel 4


63. CNET


64. Fox Atomic


65. Movietickets


66. MTV


67. NBC


68. Penguin Books


69. Regina Spektor


70. Reuters


71. Skynews


72. Sony BMG


73. Sundance Channel


74. Talpa


75. Q-Music


76. Warner Bros


77. Wired

Retail

78. Adidas


79. American Apparel


80. Calvin Klein


81. Nike


82. Philips


83. Reebok


84. Sears


85. Tendence

Telecom

86. Argali


87. Belgacom


88. Comcast


89. KPN


90. Pulver


91. Sony Ericson


92. Telus


93. Trimedia


94. Vodafone


95. You Never Call

Tourism

96. Aloft Hotels


97. Cumbrian Tourist Board


98. Mexico Tourist Board


99. STA Travel


100. Starwood Hotels

Transport & Logistics

101. Arriva


102. Connexion


103. DHL


104. Dutch Railways (NS)

Conquest of Paradise

Catholic missionaries have traveled to the ends of the earth to spread the Gospel. Now they're encouraged to enter the virtual world of Second Life and find the needy and the poor.

A Jesuit paper, La Civilta Cattolica in Rome, runs a story by Antonio Spadaro who challenges his colleagues not to fear Second Life, but instead enter it. According to Sparado is Second Life a fertile soil to find people about to change their lifes.

UPDATE

Just second after I published this post I Annie Ok, founder and director of the Second Life Art Center pointed me towards an article in the Financial Times, called Gospel 2.0: Jesuits move into Second Life.

This blog was based upon the short note in Metro, one of the Dutch free newspapers.

Virtual Banking (13): BCV

Sharp readers will have noticed I skipped no. 12 in the series of Virtual banking. No. 11 in the series was Crédit Agricole and no. 12 is Cofidis, as French banker and insurance company. That blog was titled "Have a little Cofidis" due to the Tour de France debacle.

Bank number 13 is a Swiss bank, called the BCV (Banque Cantonale Vaudoise). Here's their profile from their website:

"BCV was founded over 160 years ago to serve the people of Vaud, and we have kept our strong community focus to this day. We offer a full range of services, including retail banking, corporate banking, private banking and asset management.In addition we engage in BCV has trading activities in various financial markets. "

The island is quite craftly landscaped, stepping away from the 'normal photorealistic' trees and stuff, but doesn't hold much more than BVC's virtual Headquarters, but for a venue dating back to 7 februari 2007 it's part of the early bankers in Second Life.

In a second stage - a second Island - they've must have started looking for deeper involvement with the Second Life community and opened up BCV island 2. On this sim you'll find different venues, maybe from partners, or maybe collaborative builds but of lesser quality and inspiration than the main venue.

In a past life I used to do some webdesign and one of the deadliest sins in the business was - and still is - putting a visitor counter on a professional website. On BCV island 2 there is one ! It's on a building which counted me as visitor no. 63 since june 17.

(Okay, it's nice if you're called Esmee Denters and get 0ver 40 million views on youTube, but it's a bummer when you're a big corporate name and get only a few visitors).

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/BCV%20Island/156/121/60

5K Contest at StageSpace

There's big news at Stagespace was the introduction of an email I received from the German 3D platform Stagespace. In fall 2007 it will release its 1.0 version which will be a lot different from the current Beta version.

Stagespace will be a room for you, your creativity and your style, your stage on Internet and is organising a Design Contest with a 5K (hard euro's) reward. The contest is themed Pink is Green

Categories:

1. Architecture (interior of the locations)
2. Furniture and Object Design
3. Texture Design for clothing

The winner will take 5.000 euro in prize money, which is a nice challenge. To make sure of the quality, Stagespace has put together quite an impressive jury team to judge the entries, among which the well known industrial designer Prof. Luigi Colani.

The closing date for submitting entries is August 30 (2007)

More info on the website http://www.pinkistgruen.de/

We believe in Children. Do you?

Through my good friend Aleister Kronos I was tipped that BBH (Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty ) and RRR (rivers run red) are bringing another Charity 2.0 event to Second Life.

Peter Rogers from the Ad Agency BBH let us know that each year BBH is sponsoring a good cause, and this year it's Barnardo's, which is a charity organisation that stands up for children in need.

"Bernardo's vision is that the lives of all children and young people should be free from poverty, abuse and discrimination. We believe in the abused, the vulnerable, the forgotten and the neglected. We will support them, stand up for them and bring out the best in each and every child. As one of the UK’s leading children’s charities this is our pledge. We believe in children – do you?"

By just becoming a dad again in Real Life, it's hard to turn away from organisations like these. A child's life is too valuable and some have to face such ordeals. so I quickly went over to the BBH island [slurl]

Here's some images of the venue:

"On the 1st of August 2007 the advertising company BBH will have a special day for one of it's clients. It's called the Barnardos day out or BDO for short. The goal is to raise as much money for Barnardos as possible. We needed a plan so got together with Rivers Run Red a company that helps us turn ideas into reality for Second Life and came up with a vending machine selling t-shirts, simple and quick to create.

RRR were fantastic they gave all their time and talent for free and it wasn't long before we had the wonderful washing machine up and running. There's a set of Barnardos t-shirts to buy and we also managed to commission Airside to create a unique design to go alongside. We're hoping that later there will be more special items from friends of Barnardos, so watch this space. " says BBH consultant Pete Rogers.

Rectification on Cofidis

My previous post, titled Have a little Cofidis, needs rectification.

It's the time of the Tour de France, one of the great sports events. The past week has seen allegations made against Rasmussen -who came through clean on 15 consecutive anti-doping tests and the climax yesterday with the positive results on the Vinikourov tests and the withdrawal of the complete Astana team.

Despite the allegations, Rasmussen kept his head cool and the Rabobank mountain-goat declassified Discovery's Leipheimer and Contador in the last mile to the finish.

This morning, before today's monstrous mountain stage I blogged on the island of Cofidis, dubbed the blog have a little cofidis, meaning confidence. I'm not sure if this was a bad omen, as today it turned out that a Cofidis member returned positive on the doping tests.

Yesterday Eric Boyer, the Cofidis manager spoke disgrace of Vinikourov, calling him a dirty ****-something and demanded the whole Astana team would withdraw from the competition. Well, it's pretty obvious which course of action should be taken now with Cofidis.

Will they draw back their Pro Tour cycling team oriented island in Second Life as well?

[Pictures by AP press]

Have a little Cofides

Et maintenant? (and now what?)

Yesterday didn't see a spectaculair stage in the Tour de France, but a media circus and extremely volatile situation with Rabobanks' Rasmussen under attack and Astana's Vinokourov being tested positive on doping.

Hardly a time to take a Tour de SL, but I jumped in at Cofidis island.

Here's the Wiki knowledge about Cofidis:

"Cofidis is a French company, one of the Otto Group's financial services providers.
Founded in 1982 by 3 Suisses International in cooperation with Cetelem, Cofidis specializes in the consumer credit business of the 3 Suisses Group.

Its business concept of offering customized consumer loans either by phone or over the Internet has been exported to other countries - Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic and Greece. In 2003, Cofidis combined with Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe to found a new joint venture, Créfidis. And in 2004, Cofidis acquired a 66 % equity stake in C2C, the financial services provider of the French Camif Group."

Again it is a Financial Institute coming to Second Life, but focussing on their Pro Tour cycling team

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cofidis/130/133/27

Lights out San Fran

The grid is borked, Technorati down. What is going on?

Here's the report on Mashable:

Major San Francisco Power Outage Takes Down Web 2.0 Sites

July 24, 2007 — 03:11 PM PDT — by Pete Cashmore

A major glitch for websites and web companies based in the SOMA district of San Francisco: a massive power outage cut the supply to datacenters including those of AdBrite, Craigslist, Netflix, Technorati and SixApart. Around 20,000 people are said to have been plunged into darkness, but the number of web users affected must be in the millions.

Those affected are customers of Pacific Gas and Electric.

The Greenies go Public

Today I had an exciting talk with Jonathan Himoff, the founder of Rezzable, also known as RightasRain Rimbaud inside Second Life. The company's website itself is empty for now, but he was kind enough to send me the new corporate logo.

Since I posted on the Greenies - the softlaunch, it hit the blogosphere quite massively. Here are some posts:

• Caleb Booker: Rezzable’s Big Gamble
• VintFalken: The Greenies found a Home at Rezzable
• Second Life Insider: The Greenies
• Metaversed: Things to Do visit
• Second Life Crew: Honey, I shrunk the avatars!

The Greenies are getting a buzz. Aside from some criticism and crooky post in the Herald, I've heard nothing but cheers for the Greenies.

Me taken by Verde, one of the candid camera greenies.

Official opening party

Vint Falken wrote on her blog that she met up with a few people on the opening party, but here's the news: The official opening party still has to come!

Rezzable's official Opening Party: July 31st.

There will be a press preview around 12 am SLT and Jon really got me going for this one. There will be reveiled a sculpture of spectaculair nature, one like you've never seen before.

I jumped and said: "lemme see, lemme see", but his answer was: "Sorry mate, you'd be dying knowing and not be able to blog it."

Shortly afterwards there will be the official public launch.

Rezzables Proof of Concept

So, who's behind all of this? Caleb Booker a.k.a Onder Skall asked in his report. Is Rezzable doing this for a company? Who's putting up the cash? I asked Jon if this was a signed contract or just an expensive business card.

The Greenies is a Rezzable sim allright, no contractor, just purely a statement by Rezzable, but not to be viewed as an expensive business card, but their Proof of Concept. Rezzable wants to make sure the (virtual) world knows Rezzable is able to write a new chapter in User Experience.

The chapter will continue, there are more sims coming up!

Rezzable is hiring

Finally, if you're out there thinking "I can do this too!" give RightasRain Rimbaud a call inside Second Life as Rezzible is hiring. Rezzable is a new, small, London based firm with great ideas and projects coming up.

Virtual Banking (11): Crédit Agricole

There's another bank in Second Life, after BNP Paribas the second French Bank in SL is Credit Agricole. I've never heard from them other than that they're sponsoring one of the Tour de France teams, but that's about it.

Here's a little Wiki-knowledge on them:

"Crédit Agricole SA (CASA) (Euronext: ACA) is the largest banking group in France, second largest in Europe and the sixth largest in the world by Tier 1 capital according to The Banker magazine. It is also part of the CAC 40 stock market index.

Crédit Agricole SA is a semi co-operative bank, being majority owned by 41 French Caisses Régionales de Crédit Agricole Mutuel. Its subsidiaries are:

• Calyon, the investment banking division of Crédit Agricole.
• Calyon Financial, global futures and options brokerage serving institutional investors.
• LSA, the Asian securities brokerage division.
• Predica and Pacifica, the insurance divisions
• LCL (Previously Crédit Lyonnais), the nationwide retail banking network, acquired in 2003.

Okay, enough of the promo. We understand they're pretty big in Real Life. But I'm not sure they're big in SL yet. Their focus, like ING, is not on banking in this virtual world, or establishing a presence but on collaboration, mutualism as one of their hosts, Caliel Writer told me.

The Institute for Mutualism (have to watch typos here or it'll get mutilated) also exists in the Real World, though this isn't a replica.

Other parts of the sim are the boat, which is a part of history, space to set up future franchises and a piece of nature "where we can relax and which we should save and cherish" according to Caliel.

I'm by far too exited on getting out some new info on Rezzable, so I'll keep this short. I have to, since I logged out of SL so fast I forgot to save my transcript of the conversation with the kind Caliel. For more info, read Ambling in Second Life's Credit to Crédit Agricole.

One last remark though that should be mentioned. Right now everything is in French, but they're working on getting out the info in English as well.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/CREDIT%20AGRICOLE/119/150/23

Baseball hits SL

It's baseball time, big time as Major League Baseball finds it's hometurf in Second Life. Near the Electric Sheep Island you will find the sim inspirationally called 'Baseball' and is the virtual home to the Yankee Stadium. The NY Yankee's are the main course of this sim, but there's promo room for the Boston Socks and a few others.

Sport is something people can look forward to, enjoy. Everyone's got its favorite team or player, whichever sport you may like. Sports generate gazillions in merchandise. Sport is big business, and no wonder the focus on the Baseball sim lies on merchandise, T-shirts, trainingpants, tops, caps, hats 'n bats and gloves, as well as the hip bling bling medallions.

The stadium itself has a few chairs less than it real life counterpart to keep within server limits.

Leave base, touch air

I can't really see much added value for baseball to come to Second Life except for merchandise. Fans would like to wear their teams' colors even in virtual life. Why not take the game to another level, chance bats to broomsticks and organise a true Quidditch game.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series are immensely popular and its final episode, the Deathly Hallows just broke every thinkable sales record, so I won't get into explaining what Quidditch is, but Second Life is the platform in which you can break away from gravity and really can script broomsticks.

I know this would probably mean a huge copyright row(ling) if you'd just started building a Hogwarts courtyard with a Quidditch field, but it would surely look better than our gravity-bound real life attempts, such as this one by Reuters.

Get your Divers licence in SL

Whilst trying to get some new Dutch sims in front of my camera I stumbled into Diveworld, close to Dutch content creators DNB Media. Suspecting a tie in I went in, and immersed in front of a PADI office. And guess what, my wife's work is just next to a PADI diving center.

However, PADI isn't Dutch, it's everywhere, it's the Professional Association of Diving Instructors is the world's largest recreational diving membership and diver training organization founded in 1966 by John Cronin and Ralph Erikson.

It's HQ is based in California and all over the world you will find Diving Centers using the PADI method. PADI is the way the world learns to dive.

Their main venue - at least, the place where you immerse - is a 2-storied infocenter with instruction movies on diving, telling you what the gear is all about and links to the e-learning pages on the PADI website.

But off course, diving isn't about instruction, especially not in Second Life where you can dive without using all that cumbersome equipment. It's time to get out to the beach!

This is what diving is about:

It's not the real thing, but it looks good.

The sim isn't completely finished yet, and this beautiful reef is just a few yards wide yet. I'm curious to see how PADI is going to use this virtual venue in educational and promotional ways.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dive%20World/120/112/60

Intergalactic News for July

Here's some newsbits I didn't have time to blog in the past weeks:

Second Life Blogo reports (in Dutch) on:

• Second Life according to the (sceptic) LA Times.
• The German AWOMO initiative (a World of My Own)
• The virtual Barbie World.

The Belgian Second Life Crew reports (again in Dutch) on:

• Thalys Teleports
• Also on AWOMO.
• Second Life on a Nokia n800.

3PointD seems to be too busy to keep up blogging, but a few interesting posts did come through:

• Social Limitations to Second Life groups.
• The Guardian on Virtual Worlds.
• Amazon’s Askville is Human-Powered AdWords.

Nick Wilson at Metaversed seems to be gearing up in Challenging 3PointD as the buzzplace and reports on:

• 3DCity's Rocky Launch.
• EveryScape Taps Users to Determine Next Phase of Development.
• 3D Games Portal Worth €1 Billion?.

KZero reports on:

• Latest Football Superstars environments
• Sony prepares for Home launch

Finally, Scobleizer -who's not been in Second Life for over a year now, did a blog on SL again; Second Life is trying to get rid of the nasties, which turned out to become a lively discussion between Robert Scoble, Spindoctor Eric Rice and Information Week's Mitch Wagner.

SLBoutique ReRezzed

For quite some time the SLBoutique has been a topshopping site for Second Lifers next to the SL-Exchange. As the Second Life economy grows, these shopsites grow accordingly. Most started over a private initiative and SL-Exchange evolved into what I'd call a typical Open-Source community design.

The SLBoutique was taken over by the Electric Sheep Company several months ago and was pretty mothballed due to ESC's neglect, and in its latest design it's just pushing the ESC logo and brandname.

Today, July 23rd, the curtain falls for the SLBoutique as it will be taken offline to return in the shape of Shop OnRez come thursday. In the meantime its content will be migrated.

The Shop OnRez previews I've seen look very promising, giving it an overall slick Web 2.0 look and feel. I've never been much of an outworld shopper -primarily due to crappy navigation on these shopping sites - This one I might check out.

Last friday, ESC's Giff Constable promoted the new OnRez shop at the weekly Geek Meet. In the wrap up I've published just a part of Giff's comments on OnRez, here's some more:

"To give you a quick intro, The Electric Sheep company has long been known as a consulting company for virtual worlds, but our business goals always included building a consumer software business. Our goal is to create technologies to make virtual worlds easier to use and make information flow more efficiently.

We are launching a new brand around these consumer technologies called OnRez, with the first step launching next Tuesday. Shopping has always been important to us, which is why we bought SLBoutique in early 2006, but while we focused on our consulting business SLBoutique was neglected.

That changed early this year when we looked closely at the technology and decided we needed to overhaul the entire SLBoutique system. On tuesday we're launching Shop OnRez. Our goal overall is to make shopping easier wherever you are, and to make life a lot easier for the small businesses of SL.

We've made a lot of changes to make the whole thing more robust, to make deliveries more stable, and the whole thing better functioning. SL has some tricky things around object deliveries that took some finagling.

What really interests me though is how we're trying to bridge the Web and SL (as some others are as well). We provide a single place for a seller to load their goods, we now provide scripted vendors so they can sell those goods on the Web or in their stores. We provide search capabilities so that you can walk into a store and search right for the item you want.

The in world shopping can take the form of a scripted vendor specific to a seller, or a general OnRez shopping HUD, or a shopping kiosk you can put up. Frankly I view HUDs as rather crude, so we're also working on the open source SL client to see how we can improve shopping by embedding functionality right in the experience, but HUDs are the best we have right now!

A HUD is built on prims and LSL and it's text display and input capabilities are rough, to be extremely kind, I'd like to see more widget type functionality but that's not a tomorrow thing. we're months away from that but my view of all of this is that we need Linden Lab to improve the SL performance and scalability -- make what we have now better, but we also need to see innovation on top of this platform.

In a few weeks we'll also be relaunching the second life search engine. Linden Lab is also working on one, and I look forward to what they come up with, but we are going to go ahead and try to put out some better Web search capabilities than currently exists right now."

Virtual Religion, Real Salvation?

Whether negative, or positive, Second Life keeps getting press coverage. Most press coverage is obviously from techmagazines, regular newsitems or professional magazines. Once in a while there's a story on Religion in Second Life.

One of the first articles I read was in the TV-Guide of the Dutch Evangelical Broadcaster EO which reported on Second Life in april this year, soon afterwards followed by an article on Gamers.nl.

Here's a two observations I've made:

1. Traditional churches do not yet have an understanding of the metaverse, hence falling short in their reports which give rise to criticism and work counterproductive
2. Some churches only see the 'sin' in worlds like Second Life and feel an urge to christianize.

We've spoken on Metabrands, as being metaverse-born companies to provide services Real Life companies can't, but it seems as if there are a few Metachurches coming about as well: Churches with no Real World ties other than the Gospel. This Metachurch concept might give confessional churches a thought to ponder, as it will be hard to position them. It is hard telling where it's origins lie, like Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian or some obscure sect.

Second Life doesn't differ from the real world all that much. In Real Life sex is big business and the metaverse seems to be making the same developments as the early internet, that was seen as the digital sodom and gomorra about 15 years ago.

Nothing strange to Real Life is strange to Second Life either, but by being such a relative small and niche community, it's easy to spot these element. These elements will remain in the Metaverse, and will probably be over-represented as long as normal business hasn't found real purpose in worlds like this.

Many people come to Second Life with a purpose, but there are those out there that have no purpose in Second Life, nor in First Life. There are people hanging out at the Welcome area without a purpose in life, other than sit, chat and provoke. With regular intervals you can spot demons and Goths there, some intentional, some being mere teens without a clue to what their avatars convey, beyond 'just looking cool'

If it comes to churches in Second Life it should not be about establishing a 'church' in the Metaverse, but about being a good Samaritan. Find these people whose lives are empty and are looking for meaning. It has surprised me that a successfull programme like the Alpha Course hasn't shown up yet in Second Life.

Another course of action for Churches would be to monetize the essence of Second Life; it's freedom and anonimity. There are countries in the world where christians can't come forth without risking imprisonment or worse. Second Life may well prove to be fertile soil for underground churches and organisations like Open Doors.

Some links:

• Jakob Hienke's blog on Jesus House
• Gamers.nl article on religion in SL
• Faces of Faith in Second Life
• Anglican Church in Second Life
• ASSIST News Service (ANS) article on Christian presence in Second Life
• The News today article on the need to Christen the virtual world

Geek Meet Gadgeteers Edition 2

This week's Geek Meet saw a new Gadgeteer episode with a wide variety of speakers.
Fortunately there were some 'technical issues' that caused sound to be unfavorable. Fortunately since it's easier to blog this way.

First up was Giff Constable, or as you like Forseti Svarog of the Electric Sheep Company on the exciting OnRez shop that's replacing the well known SLBoutique.

"To give you a quick intro, The Electric Sheep company has long been known as a consulting company for virtual worlds, but our business goals always included building a consumer software business. Our goal is to create technologies to make virtual worlds easier to use and make information flow more efficiently. We are launching a new brand around these consumer technologies called OnRez, with the first step launching next Tuesday. Shopping has always been important to us, which is why we bought SLBoutique in early 2006, but while we focused on our consulting business SLBoutique was neglected. That changed early this year when we looked closely at the technology and de